DVD: "Funny Games" (2008)

The first part of "Funny Games" is pretty decent. We meet an attractive couple and their polite son as they drive through some beautiful scenery on their way to a yuppified vacation home (soy milk in the fridge and an un-ironic apron over mom's dress) where, we have been led to assume by marketing, they will be slaughtered. Soon enough their idyll is interrupted by two young men even more polite and yuppified than themselves (all exaggerated tennis whites, all very "if you please" and "thank you, ma'am") – the very young men, we've been led to assume by marketing, that will do the slaughtering. The meet-cute between the boys and the family is hilarious at the same time that it builds some excellent tension, and I was very excited to see whether the whole family would be killed or if it would be only the boy before the parents woke the fuck up from their Kubricky need to hesitate and killed their tormentors "Virgin Spring"-style. But then, out of nowhere, some seriously stupid shit went down. Right in the middle of the tension-filled happy place horror fans all love, one of the villains turned away from the suffering, sniveling family to directly address the camera and ask us – us! – which team – evil boys or virtuous family – we wanted to see win. "What do you think?" he purred.



I thought about how rampant, how unconsidered, condescension toward horror fans is. I thought, Hey, how come "Last House on the Left" was never nominated for an Oscar – how come "Dawn of the Dead"'s still relegated a "cult" classic? I thought about when Chris Rock hosted the Oscars.

The only worthwhile thing that ever happened at the Oscars was when Rock took his microphone to some downtown theater and asked regular people their opinion of the year's best picture. People who'd never heard of "Being Julia" and weren't interested in "Finding Neverland" or wine-soaked "Sideways" – people who answered the question enthusiastically and without hesitation. "'Saw'," they all said, cheerfully; "That movie was awesome." Back in Hollywood, the audience laughed and laughed. This may have been mere self-deprecation, but not wholly; after all, the fat cats were laughing in the direction of people filmmakers regularly condescend to and whom critics regular disdain as stupid and vaguely evil.

I think that Michael Haneke, the director of the recently-DVD'd Funny Games, is the kind of person who'd be laughing (forlornly) at the idiots who thought "Saw" was so much fun.

"What do you think?" The fucking presumption! Of course we wanted to see as many people as possible, of whichever group, die in as many fucked-up ways as possible, as long as the killings kind of sort of made logical sense and the story was decent. I mean, the whole breaking down the fourth wall thing made no sense to me for half a second, until I realized the villain-director wasn't talking to genre fans but to art-house "meta"-loving simps who'd been persuaded by marketing to see this movie as a feel-good-about-yourself-for-not-liking-horror-movies horror movie. The horror, in this movie, is the audience who sees it for the trailer rather than for the glossy fan letters written from Park City, Utah. These letters consistently praised the director of "Funny Games" as "deep," and reiterated Haneke's terribly condescending line: "I want the spectator to think." (About our environmental negligence and cultural dependence on consumption? About our ever-diminishing voter turnout? About the failures of our educational system? Not so much.)

But wait a minute! If he wanted us to think, why not do some documentary in which readings from Marshall McLuhan and interviews with Noam Chomsky side with recent findings correlating use of violent media with delinquency and diminished empathy? Why, instead, film tension-filled chase scenes and carefully-planted splatter? The intended audience is surely responding more, physiologically, to the genre staples here than impacted by the intended moral message. In this handling, the message becomes Briefly Consider the Consequences of Enjoying Simulated Carnage (You Might Be a Sociopath), or, Project the Fear that You Are Evil for Enjoying Simulated Carnage onto Those Who Watched Funny Games Thinking It Wouldn't Be Insulting.

A little while after I'd seen the film, I read a certain passage of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children that went like this:

"You have to understand," Seeley was saying. "They – we – all want the cod-liver oil... We want him to chide us for our lack of seriousness, and we want to shake our heads and take our castigation manfully because then we feel absolved, supremely free to watch the Oscars on TV. The way Catholics are entitled to a good piss-up on Saturday night, as long as they're taking their wigging in the pew the next morning. Lets everybody feel serious and still have fun. He's a stooge. He knows it and we know it. We're all complicit" (159-60).

Replace "stooge" with "douche" and there's your Funny Games.